With nearly a week to go before the Oscars, concerns are growing that the party might come to a juddering halt for Colin Firth and The King’s Speech next Sunday night.

Despite gathering a host of pre-Oscar awards — including a clutch of Baftas last week — and a staggering 12 nominations for the big night itself, a whispering campaign is spreading across Hollywood that appears to be aimed at derailing the film’s runaway success.

Emails have been dropping into the inboxes of some of the nearly 6,000 Academy Awards voters suggesting that the tongue-tied King George VI was anti-Semitic and supported the idea of keeping Jews fleeing from Germany in 1939 out of the safe haven of Palestine.

Ready? Helena Bonham Carter and Colin Firth, stars of The King's Speech could be set to receive some bad news

The king is said to have written to his Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax that he was ‘glad to think that steps are being taken to prevent these people leaving their country of origin’.

Despite a vigorous media campaign by the film’s producer Harvey Weinstein, himself a Jew, the fear is that the mud may stick as the Academy Awards approach. And things have not been helped by an excoriating article by Washington-based polemicist and writer Christopher Hitchens, which attacks the House of Windsor for its apparent support of Appeasement.

In it, he writes: ‘Almost the entire moral capital of this rather odd little dynasty is invested in the post-fabricated myth of its participation in “Britain’s finest hour”. In fact, had it been up to them, the finest hour would never have taken place.’

King George did make contact with at least one member of the Nazi party, through his younger brother the Duke of Kent

Against this background, Colin Firth and his co-star Helena Bonham Carter are preparing themselves for the worst — that rather than being rewarded on the big night, they may be embarrassingly snubbed.

For showbiz insiders point out that the Oscars selection panel — all film industry figures — have traditionally shown support for the Jewish cause and historically favours films about fighting the Nazis. So did our royal family harbour secret Nazi sympathies in the run-up to the Second World War? Was King George VI himself a supporter of Nazi policies, including the attempted extermination of the Jewish race?

And did he, during wartime, write a clandestine letter to the Fuhrer, as some people believe?

Certainly King George — known to his family as Bertie — was deeply concerned about what was happening in Europe. And he did, quite unconstitutionally, make contact with at least one member of the Nazi party, through his younger brother the Duke of Kent.

Two books recently published — Royals and the Reich by Professor Jonathan Petropoulos and Royal Flourish by the late Christopher Rubinstein — also question Bertie’s involvement with the Nazi Deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess, who flew to Britain in 1941 in a bid to make peace.

Was Hess responding to secret overtures from Buckingham Palace? Was the King ready to agree a ceasefire, dismiss his warmongering Prime Minister Churchill and allow the Nazis to retain their conquered European lands in return for an agreement he would not invade Britain?

If so, his ambitions bordered on being treasonable.

Revealed: King George VI, pictured with Queen Elizabeth and Winston Churchill, is believed to have had links with the Nazi regime

According to 20th-century British history expert Tom MacDonnell: ‘George VI was haunted by the memory of the Great War and had been an enthusiastic supporter of (Prime Minister) Chamberlain’s appeasement policies.

‘Repeatedly, he offered to make his own appeal to Hitler, sharing with his brother the Duke of Windsor the idea that kings and princes still had a meaningful part to play in diplomacy — as if nothing had happened to the map of Europe since 1914 when the Continent had been the private domain of royal cousins.’

Bertie was of the belief that his grandfather King Edward VII had ironed out problems between European countries which should, constitutionally, have been left to the politicians — so why shouldn’t he pursue the same course?

During King Edward VIII’s reign, their younger brother the Duke of Kent was sent as an unofficial emissary to their German relation Prince Philipp von Hessen, a Nazi go-between.

Bertie may have had a stammer, but he also had an iron determination to have his own way

And after Bertie became King in 1936, he encouraged the Duke to carry on this work. U.S. historian and highly-regarded expert on the period Professor Jonathan Petropoulos writes in his new book: ‘It would appear the King was using royal relationships in an effort to prevent a war, and that the Duke of Kent was a pawn in the appeasement game.’

He adds that Downing Street ‘wanted to constrain the royals, because the situation in Europe was too complicated and unsettled to entrust negotiations to amateurs such as the prince’. He might have added, ‘and the King’. It was in the late summer of 1939 that the Duke of Kent travelled to Florence, ostensibly to attend a wedding, but actually to talk once again to his go-between Prince Philipp.

Mind-boggling as it may seem, King George actually believed he and his family could fix a peace settlement where his politicians couldn’t. Was this meddling treasonable? Certainly it was unconstitutional, but at that time, politicians and courtiers seemed powerless to stop him.

Bertie may have had a stammer, but he also had an iron determination to have his own way.

Prince Philipp later confirmed the secret meeting with the King’s brother, recalling after the war: ‘In a last attempt to avoid the catastrophe that stood before us, I had a conversation with my cousin, the Duke of Kent, in the summer of 1939, during the course of which he indicated a way, according to his (and the King’s) personal opinion, that the worst could be avoided.’ But the controversy doesn’t end with the outbreak of war. Professor Petropoulos adds: ‘Even more striking is the idea that King

Secret's out: Colin Firth, British actress Helena Bonham Carter and British director Tom Hooper may well have been unaware of King George's Nazi's links

George VI continued to push for a negotiated peace settlement (all) through 1941. ‘After his capture in Scotland, Rudolf Hess repeatedly requested to see the King (but) his requests were regarded by the authorities as proof of his madness.’

Indeed, Hess’s flight to Britain in 1941 is a key bone of contention among those who feel suspicious that embarrassing facts had been swept under the carpet.

On the night of May 10, during the lowest point in Britain’s wartime fortunes, the all-powerful second in command to Adolf Hitler fuelled his personal airplane and took off on a mission from Augsburg in Germany.

His plan — as far as historians are allowed to know — was to land and meet the Duke of Hamilton, a friend of the royal brothers, at his south Lanarkshire home, Dungavel House.

Historian and author John Harris writes: ‘Hess was encouraged to believe that he would meet the King — that is what made him fly.’

But the plan went awry when Hess parachuted from his plane, overshot his target, missed the Duke’s estate and fell into the hands of the authorities. The authors of the two recent books claim that Hess believed he would be taken to see King George VI. Instead, he was arrested and sent to the Tower of London.

At that point, everyone involved walked away claiming it was nothing to do with them.Because the records of Hess’s attempt at peacemaking remain secret, even 70 years after the event, nobody can be quite sure what was supposed to happen next.

But Churchill, who may or may not have known of the plot, treated Hess like a war criminal rather than a peace negotiator and Britain fought on for another four years.

So what was Bertie’s involvement in the peace plot?

Trouble brewing: Two recently published books question Bertie's involvement with the Nazi dpeuty Fuhrer Rudolph Hess (Scene from the film The King's Speech)

Though the two new books’ historian authors approach the question from different angles, both conclude that the sovereign was part of the plot to lure Hess to Britain. If he was, was this a treasonable action?

Yes, says historian John Harris. He claims Bertie was ready to ditch Winston Churchill as Prime Minister, prorogue Parliament, and using his powers as sovereign, appoint a pacifist politician to head the Government and declare a ceasefire against Germany.

The king’s purpose was supposedly to ensure that Britain was not invaded, and that the Nazi war effort would be redirected towards the Soviet Union. But the price would have been a Europe over-run by the Nazis. So was Bertie really prepared to take such a measure?

‘At the time of Hess’s flight in 1941, Britain hadn’t won a battle,’ says Harris.

‘But Churchill wasn’t going to make peace. And if Hess was prepared to try for peace, it would have to be with someone other than Churchill.

‘In a hasty cover-up, all documents which could prove, or disprove, the King’s involvement in the Hess debacle were locked away.

And they remain locked away. The chances of anyone seeing them any time soon remain remote.

In June 1992, the then Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, told the House of Commons in a formal statement that the royal documentation relating to Rudolf Hess was kept at Windsor Castle; nothing could be said about when it would be disclosed to the public.

Nothing has changed since then.

Smiles turned sour: Colin Firth is preparing for the worst - being snubbed thanks to a Hollywood whispers campaign

And so nothing can be proved, either way. Or can it?

The late Christopher Rubinstein, lawyer and author of Royal Flourish, had impeccable intelligence contacts.

He was the nephew of the celebrated spymaster Ewan Montagu, who conceived major deceptions to fool the Germans during the war. Rubinstein also had a useful royal contact, an equerry called Group Captain Moon.

In Royal Flourish, Rubinstein produces the wording of a letter he believes King George VI wrote to Adolf Hitler, proposing a ceasefire between Britain and Germany.

Hitler would be allowed to keep the lands in Europe he had conquered, enabling him to direct his military might on Russia. Britain would withdraw its troops from Europe and turn its attention to the Empire.

A crucial sentence in the letter says: ‘Mr Churchill has and will have no knowledge (of these negotiations).’

In his book, Rubenstein presents the letter as merely a historical hypothesis — what Bertie might have written, given the supporting facts.

But the excellence of Rubenstein’s contacts, and his intimate knowledge of the Hess affair, raise a tantalising question: did he indeed know of such a letter written by the King, and not having had sight of it, report the contents as they had been told to him?

‘I’m convinced he believed such a letter existed,’ says his son Daniel, a lawyer, who edited the book after his father’s death. ‘He re-created the letter as far as anyone could.

‘I believe that somewhere in the Royal Archives such a letter still exists, or if it has been destroyed, then references to it will remain. The withholding of royal papers is the crucial issue here.’

Cambridge-educated Rubinstein’s book amply demonstrates that nothing during World War II was as it seemed.

There was an awful lot of eyewash, he writes, and the British public were handed huge dollops of it with their ration-books.

‘I believe my father was trying to send out a message,’ says Daniel. ‘On the face of it, this letter — apparently invented by him, but set in an otherwise totally accurate narrative — is an anomaly in the book. But given his own personal background, it bears scrutiny.’

So what does all this mean, as Colin Firth and his film head for the Academy Awards?Certainly, nobody can produce any evidence that the King was anti-Semitic. The distinguished historian Andrew Roberts dismisses the idea as ‘ludicrous’.

But did the King make contact with the Nazis through his brother Kent? Most certainly. Did he think he could fix things when the politicians couldn’t? Yes. Did he play a part in wooing Rudolf Hess to Britain? Very possibly.

But was any of this treasonable? That is less easy to assess.

The worst that can be said is that, with or without his stammer, Bertie was a flawed royal in that he believed in the divine right of kings to meddle in the political process.

He may have been a battler, but on some fronts he took the battle too far, and too personally.